Watch Your Step

Running is good for you, as long as you don't trip, slip, or stumble into a tractor.

A dog, a tractor, a patch of ice, a school bus, a hole in the ground, a walnut, a sharp branch, a bolt of lightning, a sweatshirt. None of these things is exceptionally threatening in its own natural state, but combine any with the buzzing exhaustion of a person on the road who has no business running two miles, and there will be blood. I've been told running will save your life. That's only true if it doesn't kill you first. I'll start with the sweatshirt.

I hadn't experienced a real fall in 20 years. The kind where your shoulders hit the ground—not the trip you can hop around or even the one that drops you to a knee, but the fall that happens so suddenly and so completely that you could never retrace the path of your trajectory or identify a single one of the dozen or so poses your body struck on its way down.

I was running into my driveway and trying to yank off my sweatshirt by pulling it over my head when I got tangled. I had somehow gotten the sweat-soaked cotton inside-out and wrapped tightly around my face with my biceps trapped against my ears. I should have stopped running, but I didn't. When I ﬂ exed my arms, the whole mess only drew tighter. Of course I couldn't see anything. Wrestle a wet sweatshirt onto a large dog, then pull it over his head until it's exactly halfway off and you'll have an idea of what I looked like. But you also have to put the dog up on two legs, and you have to unbalance the dog with a slight gut, and then make the dog run. While wheeling my upper body to break free, I stepped on a small disk of ice and can't say exactly what happened next, except that I came to rest on my back.

When you find yourself lying in your driveway with your belly hanging out and your sweatshirt wrapped around your face, it's a good time to ask yourself some diffi cult questions. Does this mean I have to strike "intelligent" from my résumé? And, If running is so good for you, what part of good is this? A triple fudge swirl may do certain things to your body, but one thing it will never do is roll you across the driveway. I untangled myself, patched a few scrapes, and moved on to bigger things.

I love tractors. I don't own one, but my neighbor has at least five. The house down from him has several. The neighbor on the other side has one. They all get together sometimes and pull their tractors up next to each other and leave them running and talk about God knows what—tractors, probably. Sometimes, other men with tractors join them. So there are occasionally tractors along this road full of hills and curves and lined much of the way with trees on either side. The nice thing about a tractor is you can hear it coming. What's not so nice is that sometimes a tractor is dragging an implement that takes up two lanes and has blades sticking out at every angle.

This isn't a long story. I was dragging myself up a steep hill to the sound of an approaching tractor. I moved to the right as the huge blue thing rose aggressively into the left lane—the roof, wide front tires, back tires with giant treads hailing downward. A teenager sat at the wheel with his shirt off and a trancelike expression on his face like he'd just been made to eat vegetables. The tractor rolled over the crest without slowing and was immediately followed by a multibladed contraption that stretched all the way into my lane—a wheeled thing that could probably double as a cultivator of some sort when it wasn't being used to mow down runners. I spun into the shoulder as it passed, then stood panting and feeling like I'd just dodged a—well, like I'd dodged a multibladed wheeled thing.

The tractor wasn't my fault, but the lightning was. My wife told me not to run. My kids pleaded with me to wait out the storm. I took them to the window and pointed to a distant patch of blue sky and told them not to worry. On the road, I followed the patch out a mile before it was snuff ed out under a welt of blue-gray clouds. A roll of thunder along the valley walls stopped me, then a glittering ﬂ ash turned me around. Rain began to fall in large splats. Another round of ﬂ ashing and a single clap of thunder sent me into a sprint with just over a half mile to home. The sky opened up and turned the road white, and I tried to hold steady against the water pelting my face. A lightning strike under this circumstance would be the worst kind of death, I thought, a death that is not tragic. "He went running in a lightning storm!" people would say. "And got hit by lightning!" There would be lots of head shaking but very little sympathy.

A walnut has to conspire with a school bus in order to kill a man. Add the glaring sun and a drop of sweat in the eyeballs, and you've got a rodeo, partner. A walnut as it comes off the tree is wrapped in a husk that makes it about the size and the color of a tennis ball. One day while keeping my eye on an approaching school bus, I stepped on one and stumbled within a few feet of the big black bumper as it passed. I waved at the children as I caught my balance so they would think I was doing some kind of a howdy-jig instead of just lunging forward to get squashed.

The large hole and the sharp stick were not life threatening, but I did experience them both on the same run. The hole was set up like a tiger trap by snow plows that had covered it with a structural layer of debris and topped it off with a smoothing layer of gravel. I stepped in it and rolled my ankle. On the way back, a car approached and I bent my face up like Clint Eastwood in order to mask the pain. A Clint Eastwood face makes you look fierce, but you really can't see much. As the car passed, I ran into an overhanging branch that tore across both eyelids.

Running is good for you. Some days you feel it, other days you just have to believe. Dedication is measured by your response to adversity that arrives on its own schedule in a vehicle of its own making. When you decide to take a real shot at running, you imagine you'll have to endure an occasional battle against the cold or the heat, your knees or ankles, boredom or your own sloth. What you don't imagine is the possibility of a deathmatch against your own sweatshirt. And for treadmill runners who disparage the dangers of the open road—how many of you have bobbed your head like a rock-star and spun off the belt? No matter where you run or how you run, anything can happen and usually does. You can pick the road, decide the path, fix the speed, but you can't choose the tractor.

About the dog. It hasn't bitten me yet but I can tell it really wants to. A friend of mine ran by the dog's house and it jumped straight through the front windowpane, and chased him all the way to my front door. Now there is a piece of cardboard where the window was and the dog is tied to a porch rail with a length of bailing twine. One day the twine will break and the dog will come. I can't choose the day. I can only lace up and hit the road all the same.